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Forum:Proposal: New namespace and Columbia themed skin
New Columbia Theme Ever since the announcement of BioShock Infinite, dedicated members of the community have worked to put the new game's information on BioShock Wiki. However, it is strange to have information about the bright city of Columbia stuck against the dark background of Rapture which currently covers all pages on BioShock Wiki. I hope to improve that. Working with a few other editors, I have created an entirely new skin theme that will fit more with the bright world of Columbia. You can see a preview of it on my blog page and in the image to the right. My hope is that we can have this Columbia-themed skin show only on pages about BioShock Infinite, and keep the Rapture skin for all other pages. Why a ? The Columbia theme will be applied through MediaWiki:ColumbiaTheme.css. Currently, the only way to apply the skin to all BioShock Infinite pages would be to list every single relevant page in the CSS. That would be ridiculously difficult to maintain as the number of pages grows. Instead, we can request that Wikia create a new "Infinite" namespace on BioShock Wiki and then move all the appropriate pages to that namespace. This would allow me to apply the CSS to all pages in that namespace at once- a much tidier process. This system of separate skin themes has been used on other wikis, such as Avatar Wiki before the new Wikia/Oasis skin went live. In practice, that would mean moving all pages about BioShock infinite to titles with the prefix "Infinite:" Thus: *Booker DeWitt would be moved to Infinite:Booker DeWitt *BioShock Infinite Weapons would be moved to Infinite:BioShock Infinite Weapons, or even just Infinite:Weapons Wikia requires that there be community consensus about a new namespace before they will grant the request, so please voice your support or disapproval of this idea below. Discussion (Please place all your comments and suggestions below.) This is a fantastic idea. I'd gladly help move the pages to the new namespace. --Willbachbakal 01:02, July 14, 2011 (UTC) :*shoves Will aside* Not before me! I was involved in this when you were still a young lad, staring down upon the open fields, dreaming of someday touching down and meeting the wonderful people of the world! ~Ṃᶒɠą§ɔîéɳčę { talk } 02:02, July 14, 2011 (UTC) ::I'm glad you like the idea. I do want to caution you that we shouldn't move anything until Wikia makes the change: if we rename anything to add an "Infinite:" prefix before then, the renamed pages will become inaccessible. ~'Gardimuer' [[User talk:Gardimuer|{ ʈalk }]] 02:06, July 14, 2011 (UTC) I'm not sure to understand. We can simply apply the new background to the entire wikia but also apply it only to the Infinite articles, and to do so we will need to place Infinite: before each name? If that is right, I don't like the the second solution as it will make difficult to reach the Infinite pages and also to use the research bar. If I misunderstand, please explain me better how it works for separate skins. =\ --Pauolo 09:14, July 14, 2011 (UTC) :From what I understand, it'll just make the background skin change when you go to an Infinite article, you'd still be able to use the search bar and links as per normal. --Willbachbakal 09:23, July 14, 2011 (UTC) ::I understood that, but still, will we have to rename each Infinite article? Because, if it was my first visit to the wikia, how would I know that to reach the Songbird's article I will have to write Infinte:The Songbird in the search bar? It is already a pain in the ass (forgive my rudeness) to reach the links page or the users pages (like User:MegaScience for example), and if we have to do the same for regular articles about Infinite, it could be a lot troublesome. --Pauolo 09:44, July 14, 2011 (UTC) :::Where appropriate we will leave redirects pointing from (for example) "Songbird" to "Infinite:Songbird", that way people can still find the articles using the search bar and linking. In other cases we will use disambiguations, same as usual. ~'Gardimuer' [[User talk:Gardimuer|{ ʈalk }]] 14:45, July 14, 2011 (UTC) ::::Isn't there another way to apply this...? Maybe only apply to pages with a certain category? Some way that doesn't interrupt the linking flow? I hate redirect versions of pages. The links to the page are redirects and such. People read the links I copy and get their own editing wrong. ~Ṃᶒɠą§ɔîéɳčę { talk } 15:28, July 14, 2011 (UTC) ::::I agree with MegaScience, I never liked the way how the links are redirected too. And still, I don't like the idea of Infinite articles with title on the top of the page always beginning by Infinite: (like the Links page with BioShock Wiki: in the title), or maybe there is a way to directly edit those titles without changing the article's name. ::::Also, I always thought of a background mixing underwater and sky views, but that may confuse the viewer who could believe that we admit with certitude that both Rapture and Columbia are part of the same universe (which we don't know yet). And I don't even know who could realize such background. --Pauolo 20:59, July 14, 2011 (UTC) :::::CSS works by assigning styles to elements that share a specific class. All pages in a certain namespace have a class from that namespace. Categories do not create class identities that can be seen by CSS. Thus, categories are not effective for this goal. There might be a JavaScript way to insert a class name into the body element under a given condition... but I don't know enough about JS to create such a code, and I don't even know if the load order of CSS and JS files would allow that to work. :::::Pauolo, there are ways to change the title that displays at the top of an article, although the full html address of the page will always remain the same. Thus we can hide the "Infinite:" part of the title to make things look neater, if you want. (See Template:Title on Wookiepedia) :::::As for a combined background, I do think that would be cool on the main page, and at some point we may create something like that. ~'Gardimuer' [[User talk:Gardimuer|{ ʈalk }]] 22:50, July 14, 2011 (UTC)